Showing posts sorted by relevance for query david french. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query david french. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

DEMENTIA '16.

That Egyptian river ran through Columbia Heights today:
Don't Blame the Republican Party for the Rise of Trump
Because he's the Democratic nominee presumptive? No. Because he's the nominee presumptive in some other party that isn't the Republican Party? No. Because [throws a handful of dirt in your face, runs]. This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written. Seriously, look at this:
Or maybe those liberals shouldn't be forgiven so easily. I’ve been pondering these theories -- advanced by everyone from Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Bill Maher -- and the thing is, they don’t make a heck of a lot of sense. They seem to posit a Republican electorate that is, on the one hand, so malleable that the GOP leadership could create the emotional conditions for a Trump candidacy -- and on the other hand, a Republican electorate so surly and unmanageable that it has ignored the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals, in order to rally behind Trump.
That there is some bullshit, and not just because what she presents as either-or choices are not mutually exclusive, but also because both the "either" and the "or" are gibberish. GOP voters don't have to be "malleable" to turn from covertly pyscho to overtly psycho: They only needed to suffer through two Black President terms, bookended by the humiliation of George W. Bush (hey, wonder if the Republicans will finally invite him to a convention this year?) and the recent Gay/Trans Apotheosis, for their psycho-sap to rise and run over all by itself.

Neither is there anything weird about the Trumpenproletariat "ignoring the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals." Who, aside from some National Review cruise-goers and Inner Circle party donors, has ever cared what Jonah Goldberg and Billy Kristol said or thought? The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up -- hell, they were hot for President Sarah Palin until she decided to run a safer grift. And before Ronald Reagan's elevation to sainthood, he was just a talking doll with a nice smile and strong appeal to the Strom Thurmond wing of the Party -- which wing never went away, but only got older, grimmer, and mad that they can't say the n-word anymore because of political correctness.

The rest is also crap and who has time, but I will say that anyone who writes "triple-distilled balderdash … high-test twaddle … self-congratulatory swill … nonsense on stilts" ought to be sent to a young-fogey rest home and given plenty of sedatives.

Believe it or don't, McArdle was still out-crazied -- but, less surprisingly, by David French:
The American people need the chance to make a better choice. Given the stakes of the election, to simply leave the race to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to guarantee a terrible presidency marked by incompetence and cronyism. There is just one hope — however slim — of avoiding this national disaster: America needs a third option.

And at this point, Mitt Romney is the only man who combines the integrity, financial resources, name recognition, and broad public support to make a realistic independent run at the presidency.
Does French actually think Romney has a chance in hell? He has at least enough brain cells left to be sneaky with his answer:
A third-party Romney bid would introduce the chance of a different outcome, giving millions of Americans the important option to choose a man of integrity as their president.
Similarly, millions of Americans had the important option to choose windshield washer fluid over Coca-Cola as their beverage at lunch. It could happen!

But the goo-goo ga-ga winner is David Marcus at (where else?) The Federalist:
How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism
Long story short, liberals are talking about bad things white people do, and how else can a rational honky react except by going neo-Nazi?
White people are being asked -- or pushed -- to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more.
I see a crying cowboy in Oklahoma, who can't watch TV no more without seeing them Key and Peele fellers talking down His People -- and since you libtards injected race into things, this is forcing the cowboy to "identify with it more." Marcus laments:
This is a remarkably bad idea. The last thing our society needs is for white people to feel more tribal. The result of this tribalism will not be a catharsis of white identity, improving equality for non-whites. It will be resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.
When we start lynching people, remember who started it! Why must you always provoke us.

Friday, June 19, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Billy Ficca. The right kind of shrill.

•   Two days after Charleston, National Review's The Corner is a river in Egypt. Don't you dare blame guns! What's so racist about the Confederacy? (Reihan Salam gently suggests that maybe now is not the time to fly the Battle Flag, and NRO commenters erupt with rebel yells -- "I think beta males and PC finks like our author here - will guarantee that flag flies proudly for some time to come," etc. -- and racism, some of it specifically aimed at Salam, e.g. "Reihan Salam's pals are currently destroying symbols in Mosul, Ramadi and Palmyra. He's not a good source for rational thought, as Kipling would say.") But the craziest -- so far -- is David French. The title of his post, "If One of the Churchgoers in Charleston Had Been Armed..." promises crackpottery, and the post itself delivers more than just a maudlin fantasy of heat-packing parishioners saving the day. Sample:
As I read the news and watched the coverage, I felt stricken for the victims, fury at the attacker, and more than a little personal conviction. Not because of any silly notions of collective white guilt or other nonsense peddled by the radical Left — and certainly not because I’ve long opposed the Left’s gun-control efforts and supported the individual, inherent right of self-defense, including the right to keep and bear arms. No, I felt conviction because of the numerous times that I’ve walked out of my house unarmed and thus largely incapable of defending myself — and, more important, others — from violent acts. Perhaps I chose not to wear the right kind of clothing — pants that allow me to conceal my carry pistol, for example. Perhaps it crossed my mind to carry, but I thought, “I’m not going anywhere dangerous.” The men and women at the Emanuel Bible study probably didn’t think they were in any danger, either... 
If the unthinkable happens, and I watch as my family, my friends, or even members of my community I’ve never met are hurt or killed when I could have prevented it by carrying the weapon I’ve trained myself to use, I could never forgive myself...
Don’t just carry. Don’t just go to the state-mandated training, buy a weapon, and then forget about it. Unless you train yourself to use it, that weapon would probably be less useful to you in an emergency than a similarly weighted rock. At least you’d instinctively know to throw the rock. Practice with a handgun until you can take it from a position of safe carry to active engagement within seconds. Then practice that again until you’ve beaten your best time. Then practice again. And realize that practice isn’t a burden but a joy...
So Charleston inspires French to be even more of a gun nut -- one who can't go anywhere without one -- and to try and get the rest of us to support his fantasy by playing with guns until we love them like he does. In the immortal words of Max Bialystock, this man should be in a strait-jacket.

•   Meanwhile at PJ Media, here's some culture war from David Swindle:


Why can't Tyrion be nice? Also, Leopold Bloom went to prostitutes, when they make a TV show out of it let's fix that. But here's my favorite part:
The concept that I propose discussing, which Game of Thrones illustrates better than any show on television today, is this: Postmodern Pornography. How is pomo-porno different than the traditional variety? In much the same way that Barack Obama’s Saul Alinsky-style, pragmatic community-organizing Marxism differs from the more honest Marxism of his mentors Frank Marshall Davis, Derrick Bell, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn.
Say what you want about the tenets of Swindlism, dude, at least it's an ethos.

•   Hey, remember that Bullets and Bourbon thing the Ole Perfesser and a bunch other nuts were planning for December? Here's fresh promo by Ed Driscoll. Stephen Green narrates from (it sounds like) inside a barrel over telephone hold music about how the Perfesser et alia will be talking to guests "about threats to the Second Amendment." (This is at a ranch in Texas, by the way, which is like talking about threats to the rich at Davos.)  Then the music changes to U2 Muzak and we see guys shooting at targets, which Green describes as "images to really whet your appetite." Targets! What about the most dangerous game? If I'm paying $1,699 I expect to get all likkered up and hunt humans. Maybe there's a platinum-level membership they aren't telling us about.



Monday, July 11, 2016

FOR HONKY FOLK WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN DONALD TRUMP IS ENUF.

Just read Rod Dreher's rhapsody on Hillbilly Elegy, an autobio by one J.D. Vance about how he, a son of Appalachia, escaped the depredations of the holler thanks to Mamaw and the U.S. Marines. Dreher's main take-away seems to be that hillbillies (the ones who didn't get out) are lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving and they need Jesus and Brother Rod's Benedict Option, in stores soon. Here's just one depressing piece:
Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. 
(That's the bless-their-hearts part.)
He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them.
Plus they's always a-fuckin' and a-feudin' -- "Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common," he tsks. Why, they're as bad as the blacks!
Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?
Maybe the job of Black Wingnut doesn't pay as well as it used to -- I mean, I'm sure this guy (author of "If You Don’t Want Police To Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest") gets lots of high-fives from Young Republicans, but I doubt he's making Clarence-level bank. But whatever Dreher's problems with black folk, this is just a brief detour for him; clearly white worthlessness is his hard-on here; he loves that the enlightened hillbilly Vance got out because it shows how shiftless the rest of them are. In fact, he references Kevin D. Williamson's infamous hymn of hate for poor whites --
I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment.
Thank you, Rod "Imitation of Christ" Dreher. (Isn't it perfectly Dreheresque that, though he feels himself closer to Williamson's hatefulness, he wouldn't "put it the way he did"?)

As I mentioned when I wrote about Williamson's column, Dreher's review is part of a growing wingnut literature on how badly the poor honkies have let them down. There are a couple reasons why it's growing. For one thing, obviously, the rise of Trump has got these white-collar conservatives scared -- for years they applauded Joe and Jane Sixpack (remember them?) because they thought the Sixpacks were sufficiently racist, sexist, and otherwise class-resentful that they would reliably return Republican electoral majorities; then, however, it appeared they'd lost control of their Monster.

But this tendency slightly pre-dates Trump -- Charles Murray's book about the plight of white "Fishtown" punters (and David Brooks' effusions over it) go back to 2012. So there are clearly other reasons, and I can see them, too. First, the demographics that created the second Obama victory shattered mainstream conservatives' belief that whiteness might yet save them another time. Second, white-collar conservatives noticed that when they raved about lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving black people, everyone under 60 years of age gave them the stinkeye -- but if they just ported their viciousness over to another out-group, no one except obsessives like me paid any attention.

In fact, poor whites' very status as an out-group may have been the clincher. When it came out that white working-class people had begun committing suicide at an alarming rate, the first reaction of David French at National Review was to blame liberal hippies for making crackers feel bad.  But four months later French had changed his tune: "No one is making them do it," he had decided; "...The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin..." They were, rather, only the victims of their own "self-destructive moral failures."

In many ways, my friends, it's no fun to get old, but there is some grim amusement to be had seeing people who thought for years that hate had made them safe learning God's truth the hard way. (You may think I'm talking about the poor whites, for whom I have much sympathy -- after all, I come from them -- but I'm really talking about the guys who've just thrown them overboard and are about to find out that the mainsail won't hoist itself.)

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

SOTU NRO LOL.


Hee hee.


Hee hee hee.


Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee 


Ah, I see their tweets are slowing down:

And getting pissy:

And when Obama talks against racism, David French gets even more David Frenchy:

And Kevin D. Williamson gets more Sparky, or drunk:

Now, I could go that same route -- like, "Bleargh attend my words earthlings my avatar is a FOUNDING FATHER"--

But, as Charles Laughton said in Advise and Consent, "I can afford to be charitable." Whatever you think of Obama and his SOTUs, you have to admit a large check in his favor is how mad he makes the biggest assholes in America.

Oh, and in conclusion...

...fart.

Ultimately it was a forgettable State of the Union Address – as most are. But there is one way it will be extremely memorable. President Obama not only celebrated his ridiculous and dangerous Iran deal in his remarks, but he totally ignored the fact that Iran captured 10 U.S. sailors today. The administration is telling reporters it’s not big deal and they will all be released in the morning, Iran time. 
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to tell you that the sailors were released about five hours later. But let's see how Goldberg prepared for this eventuality:
Well, if that’s true, the incident will likely be quickly forgotten. But, if it turns out that this becomes anything like a hostage situation, Obama’s final State of the Union will may be remembered as symbolic of his denial and delusions. It could make his claim, right before the Paris attacks, that ISIS is “contained” seem like a minor gaffe.
If only a terrorist had killed Obama during his speech! That would have been highly ironic!
My hopeful expectation is that won’t happen, and we will get our sailors back ASAP. But even if that does happen, I have every expectation that Iran will commit some other deed that will make Obama’s confidence seem ridiculous. Because on the Iran deal, and so many other things, his confidence is ridiculous.
One of these days the Iran-America deal will slip up, and when it does Detective Goldberg will be there to catch it. At least he hopes so: He's not very good at hiding, not least because when he gets nervous he flatulates like the 124-foot pedal on a pipe organ.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

HOW DARE YOU PHILISTINES OBJECT TO MY MURDEROUS RAGE.

Last week I made my feelings known about Kevin D. Williamson, the latest wingnut hire in the not-exclusively-wingnut press, and so did lot of other liberals who were surprised (as I was not) that The Atlantic would hire a guy who said, in so many words, that women who have abortions should be executed.

Now I see conservatives are extremely butthurt that anyone would speak harshly of Williamson -- which, given Williamson's own viciousness, is pretty rich right off the bat. But the defenses -- oy. Get a load of Bill Kristol, an unrepentant Iraq Warmonger sometimes unaccountably celebrated by liberals for being anti-Trump:


I can't guess what he means by "reality-based," unless Kristol accepts as empirical truth that women who have abortions should be killed, or that in our rich land it's morally acceptable that white working class people must either move hundreds of miles to find subsistence-wage jobs like the Joad family or die, or that the Republican Party remains black Americans' best friends and the only reason they don't accept that is because they're stupid. And I wouldn't put it past him! As for "indomitable," I assume he means Williamson can't be moved off his ridiculous ideas for anything -- but why should he? He's one of the more successful professional assholes of our time.

But the weirdest thing is the reference to the "philistine progressive mob."  First, some mob -- they couldn't keep the New York Times from employing David Brooks, Bret Stephens, and Ross Douthat, nor the Washington Post from hiring Megan McArdle,  nor Williamson from joining a masthead once occupied by James Russell Lowell. Also, I don't know what he finds "philistine" about them, given that, compared to the advocates of welfare, universal healthcare, and public education, the epithet more closely fits Williamson; maybe Kristol is even dumber than I thought, and thinks Williamson's frequent forays in Roget's Thesaurus mean he's an intellectual.

But wait, there's more -- h/t @Trillburne for this:


And:


Nobody knows the trouble they've seen! And Reason's Cathy Young actually posted something called "The Kevin Williamson Two-Minute Hate," as if he were being driven from The Atlantic instead of publicized for joining it. Young criticized people who accurately reported Williamson's abortion comment as "outrage mobs"; then she offered this defense of Williamson:
About those “hang women who have abortions” tweets: I’m reasonably certain this was not a statement of Williamson’s actual views, especially since he has expressed qualms about the death penalty in general. 
How could someone possibly be hypocritical by being pro-life yet wanting to kill pro-choice adults?
Williamson is no Milo Yiannopoulos, but he can be a provocateur. 
What's especially funny about this is, Young was a big fan of Milo before things got too hot for her.
Assuming that he was trolling, it was definitely not one of his best moments... 
This, not to put too fine a point on it, is bullshit; Williamson doubled down on his statement when pressed. But at least it isn't as weak as when Young tweeted that what Williamson said wasn't so bad because he was only endorsing the execution of future abortion-having women, not women who'd had them in the past. 

Meanwhile at National Review David French does a whole argle-bargle-you-are-persecuting-this-fine-man shtick without once mentioning what Williamson said about women who had abortions -- he just says liberals persecute Williamson because he "holds a lot of bad opinions — opinions about abortion," but doesn't articulate the one homicidal opinion that people are complaining about, probably because moderates and bothsiders anxious to believe Buckleyite conservatives are just their brothers from another mother, and even some conservatives, might be dismayed to see it and have to pretend they hadn't when Williamson's column finally launches with, in the spirit of comity, a call to kill both women who have abortions and women who use cell phones in theaters. Look, he's meeting you halfway! Sheesh, you guys are such a mob.

It's very interesting that conservatives who would not themselves publicly call for the executions Williamson favors -- because that's a little too hot for the early-show crowd, I guess -- cheer on Williamson for doing so. It perfectly fits the Age of Trump, in which credentialed conservatives roll their eyes when the brute does something gauche, but cluck over their good fortune when he stuffs a reliable anti-Roe vote onto the Supreme Court and rub their hands at the probability that he'll give them the Iran invasion they've been dreaming about -- sure, he'll only do it to save his own electoral skin, but who cares so long as they get the conflagration and the contracts that go with? Williamson rolls his eyes at Trump, as well, but in his own way he too is a berserker, and his followers excitedly anticipate the creative destruction he may wreak on their behalf. And if anyone has the gall to say out loud how ridiculous this all is, they'll flop to the soccer pitch holding their dignity and scream that they've been fouled.

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

SOWHAT.

No, I didn't watch it. The Leader's alleged charms, which so enamor the yokels, have always been lost on me; were I paid like the glossier pundits to put up presentation scores on TV, America would be dismayed by my lack of generosity. Hadn't I seen The Leader coolly, confidently avoid eating a rat? Never mind TV, I see the New York Times giving him championship scores:
Trump’s First State of the Union Address: A Call for Unity That Wasn’t Always Heard That Way
Opinions vary! Are immigrants filth, or merely filthy? The Times goes on:
The president promised an optimistic, bipartisan speech, and he largely avoided some of the negative imagery of past speeches. Gone was the “American carnage.”
A look at the transcript shows that American carnage is only "gone" because The Leader has done us the favor of being in charge and suddenly trends that were denounced in 2016 are, though unchanged (like black unemployment) or even weakened (like the rise of the stock market), signs of a "roaring" economy. "Mr. Trump is at heart a salesman," chortles the Times, "and he rarely lets details get in the way of a good story."

And anyway, who needs American carnage when you have MS-13, which became The Leader's stand-in for all immigrants on a certain end of the paper-bag scale (except maybe that nice Messican soldier)? He made clear that he was letting Democrats bring in a few of their foreign riffraff (compromise!) so long as they show "good moral character," which will be affirmed or denied as Republicans require to soothe or rile the white masses at any given moment.

Apart from the vital racism, it was the usual rah-rah ("We heard about Americans like firefighter David Dahlberg. He is here with us too..."), and the dopes are sucking it up. At the crest of the expected wave of conservatives starbursts I find most remarkable one that doesn't mention the SOTU but was obviously planned to coincide with it -- a National Review column by Ben Shapiro (the fighting wingnut who can talk to the young!) about how great everything is (literally called "2018 Is a Great Time to Be Alive") because of the blessings of the free market: he actually cites that traditional conservative conversation-stopper the iPhone, but also increased longevity ("We’re living longer: In 1980, our life expectancy was 73.6 years, but as of 2010, it was 78.7"). Remember all that garment-rending over news that white people were actually living shorter lives, like David French blubbering "D.C. can’t fix problems of the heart" and Shapiro's Daily Wire colleagues asking "If Obamacare Was So Great, Why Did Life Expectancy Drop Last Year?" You won't hear that, or anything else bad about our virtually unchanged economy, from these guys for a while -- as long as the Trumpkins are free to loot the Treasury, befoul the environment, and suppress the vote, it's again Morning in America, with a slightly more downscale con artist in charge.

UPDATE. Look, the original White Working Class whisperer is back among the Pennsyltucky Trumpenvolk, as Salena Zito takes the SOTU pulse of the Ripepi family of Venetia, Pa. These are not quite shot-and-beer salt-of-the-earth Trumpkins -- pops is "chief of surgery at a suburban Pittsburgh hospital" -- but, Zito assures us, they are of "the upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb..." So I guess that makes them Honorary Blue Collar, as does their butch rightwing politics (see 15-year-old daughter Lillie: "On the wall, she was adamant: 'Build it.'" Bet at school she's president of Model Identity Evropa!). I though father Tony Ripepi looked familiar, so I checked and sure enough -- Zito used him before, right after the 2016 election. Her lede then:
Dr. Anthony Ripepi wants the cosmopolitan class — who so misread everything about this election cycle — to know the first thing they might want to shed is their constant mocking of those who live in flyover country.
The chief of surgery had a thing or two to say back then to them cosmopolitans from flyover country, or a very comfy "upper-middle-class exurb" of it, and apparently still does. (And here’s Ripepi in another Zito column from January 2017, this time portrayed [for added WWCW points] as one of those Trump voters who "grew up Democrat voters in blue-collar manufacturing towns," back before his first million.) Well, hunting down real proles is a lot of work -- the WWCW gig is easier when the subjects come pre-vetted.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT WE, THE BIGOTS, ARE REALLY THINKING!

I'm unlocking another Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter issue -- this one about the mishegas around Michael Jackson. As you may imagine I'm not entirely convinced that people who have suddenly realized MJ was a child molester are acting in good faith. (By the way, I swear that you're missing a lot of other first-class material if you're not a subscriber -- go here and get on board.)

Speaking of people who have a strange reaction to explosive revelations, I'm not shocked that conservatives are uniformly defending Tucker Carlson's racist and rapist comments. Typical is this guy (formerly a famous Latin-pseud crackpot) at MAGA cult site American Greatness:
Let’s be completely clear here. Nobody—least of all the leftwing mobs attacking Tucker Carlson right now—cares what he said on the radio a decade ago. Except to the extent that his words can be wrapped around his neck like a noose. 
All the feigned outrage is exactly that: feigned. David Brock and his henchmen, along with their instantly mobilized Twitter mob, are not outraged. Not in the least. They’re giddy! And why wouldn’t they be? They’ve been looking for a way to get “Tucker Carlson Tonight” canceled since the show debuted. The search intensified as its popularity rose and its message caught fire. 
The imperative to kill the show reached a fever pitch after Carlson’s now-legendary January 2 monologue, which is the most searing indictment against a failed ruling class since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
Three sputter-filled grafs (and about a dozen thereafter) and no mention of what Carlson actually said; you'd think he had defended motherhood and the flag rather than child rape and white supremacy.

But frankly the unearthed Carlson is just a more-upfront version of the Carlson we've known all along -- the Carlson who told Lauren Duca "stick to the thigh-high boots" and dog-whistles racists with alarming regularity. And more-upfront Carlson excites them for a reason. Someone on Twitter lamented that the right's solidarity with Carlson showed how devoted to "tribalism" people have become. But I say these guys aren't defending Carlson because he's of their tribe -- even some conservatives, after all, peeled off the Roy Moore bandwagon in the final days. No, they defend Carlson because they agree with what he said. Not to put too fine a point on it, they're white supremacists and misogynists, and only wish they could say such things themselves and get away with it. Well, as the Trumpification of the Right progresses, I'm sure they'll get their wish.

UPDATE. As usual, making everything worse, National Review's David French:
Here’s the way it works. If you’re a conservative or a Republican who attains any kind of prominence at all, then the hunt is on. Media Matters has its rolling list of allegedly bad or silly things I’ve said and written, for example. And the more prominent you are, the more diligent the hunt.
Being accurately quoted is persecution! Or, in the words of A. Ridiculous Pseudonym at RedState, "Maoist totalitarianism."

If only Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd had tumbled to this racket! After embarrassing himself at the end of the movie, he could have attacked those liberals who were persecuting him by describing what he said.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

The Federalist cheerfully declares:
This Election Marks The End Of America’s Racial Détente
Jamelle Bouie is right about one thing: the racial social contract we’ve had is over. Whites aren’t content to let everyone but them get special treatment any more.
Wondering WTF? Got you covered: The article is by David Marcus, who had previously regaled us with "How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism," in which he complained that black people were inexplicably harshing on his white brothers and sisters:
What is new is the direct indictment of white people as a race. This happened through a strange rhetorical transformation over the past few years. At first, “white men are our greatest threat” postings tended to be ironic, a way of putting the racist shoe on the other foot. They were meant to show that blaming an entire race for the harmful actions of a few individuals is senseless.

Then the tenor changed. What started as irony turned into an actual belief that white people, specifically white men, are more dangerous and immoral than any other people. Loosely backed up by historical inequities and disparities in mass shootings, this position has begun to take a serious foothold.
Marcus went on to warn us that if blacks didn't cut it out, him and his honkies were going to get "tribal" on them. From the new column, it would appear he thinks the Trump election proves Der Tag has come. At first he moons over Jamelle Bouie's "White Won" election post-mortem with the performative empathy of David French or Rod Dreher mooning over Ta-Nehisi Coates, then catches Bouie's observation on American whites and blacks that "I thought this meant we had a consensus. It appears, instead, that we had a detente." Darn right, says Marcus:
The rules of the deal were pretty straightforward. For whites, they stated that outright racist statements and explicit appeals to white racial identity were essentially banned. Along with this, whites accepted a double standard about the appropriateness of cultural and political tribalism. For obvious and reasonable historical and economic reasons, black and brown people explicitly pursuing their own interests was viewed differently than whites doing the same thing.
Finally, the answer to the ancient "how come they can say 'nigger' and we can't?" riddle! But when Trump got away with racist shit in broad daylight, says Marcus, that showed "the white acceptance of legitimate racial double standards had dissipated, and without it the détente could not stand." And that's because black folk got out of hand, and started "calling everyone a racist" -- white people got pissed and now you people have to accept their terms. These terms are left vague -- some bullshit about listening to each other, which probably means no more kneeling at ball games, and definitely no getting upset about an elected official cheering the idea that Michelle Obama is an ape -- come on, we let Chris Rock make fun of the way we talk! Marcus attempts to sweeten the deal with some poetry:
The détente was far from perfect. It often allowed quieter racism to lurk unchallenged. In some ways, it was a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. But Band-Aids have a role to play in treating bullet wounds...
Yeah, this guy should definitely be at the table for the negotiation of the New Detente, right next to Attorney General Rudy Giuliani.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

YOUNG IDEAS.

I saw Bryan Curtis' story at The Ringer, "Sportswriting Has Become a Liberal Profession — Here’s How It Happened." It's got some interesting history, and the observation that more sportswriters are liberal now than in the days of Dick Young has to my knowledge not been remarked on before, so good for him.

 At the same time: So what? It's not like it gets in the way: If I want to follow a sports story I go to the New York Times and, though the Good Grey Lady is supposed to be the nerve center of the Liberal Media, I don't receive any discernible propaganda with my box scores. Look at this story about the DeMarcus Cousins trade, for example: There's nary a call to resistance nor an #IAmMuslimToo hashtag in the thing. I understand they put a little more mustard on the stories at Deadspin, but if I want straight sports I know where to get it.

Well, at The Week Michael Brendan Dougherty bursts a blood vessel over this because
Predictably (and perhaps self-interestedly), I think the increasing ideological uniformity of sports writing is bad for sports journalism and for sports themselves. And in the way that it encourages conformism and intellectual laziness, it is probably bad for causes dear to liberals in sports.
We might have stopped at "self-interestedly" -- Dougherty does some sports journalism himself, and he's no less inclined than any other type of wingnut scribe to indignation over how the Lefties run the intellectual professions. And that "bad for causes dear to liberals in sports" is concern trolling you could spot from an airplane. And the bit about "conformism and intellectual laziness" -- this is sportswriting we're talking about, right? It's not all Grantland Rice; hell, it's at least as loaded with hacks as any of the other departments. Besides, to the extent someone tries to bring social perspectives into a sports essay, he's actually doing more work, not less, so I'd hardly call it lazy.

Dougherty seems to sense he hasn't got much there, so he tries a twist on the old Liberals Are Soulless Technocrats spin, claiming that liberal sportswriters are all front-row tryhards so they identify with manicured college-boy front-office types ("the liberalism on offer on sports pages is rather infatuated with the norms and aspirations of the class of people from which journalists are drawn") whereas, one supposes, conservative sportswriters like Dougherty come from dockyards out of an old black-and-white Warner Brothers movie and get along so great with the players that they all go to titty bars together.

On and on it goes, and like all wingnut liberal-media bitchfests reaches the point where the author, in his righteousness, disgorges a howler:
The lack of intelligent conservatives in sports, or at least their relative shyness about their ideas, also allows progressive sportswriters to advance ideas without challenge, sometimes all the way into dead ends. Take the debate about Native American mascots in logos. Of course it makes perfect sense to remove or alter any logos that offend people. But all mascots are reductive caricatures. Was the problem that the logos were offensive or that there is so little representation of Native Americans in our culture that their presence as mascots seems mocking by default? 
He's got a point. Look at the '40s White Sox logo -- that's one weird looking honky! If white people can take that, what are all you injuns complaining about? Hang on, sports fans, Dougherty ain't done cogitating:
Has no one stopped to notice there is something odd about an anti-racism that will cause an evermore diverse country to declare rooting for white-faced mascots the only safe thing to do? How will this deletion of all non-white faces look in 50 years?
You all remember how, when politically correct liberals chased Stepin Fetchit out of the movies it wiped out opportunities for black actors, and a starstruck kid named Sidney Poitier had to pack up his "Lay Z. Shine" character, move back to the Bahamas and sell insurance.

Yeah, the sports pages are really missing this guy. But to prove it can always get worse, David French picks up the theme at National Review:
Sure, [Curtis is] tolerant enough to leave room for a “David Frum or Ross Douthat of sportswriting,” a person with “wrong-headed but interesting arguments.” But here’s the caveat: Curtis is tolerant “as long as nobody believe[s] them.” If the Ross Douthat of sportswriting developed a real following, would the profession unite to excise the political malignancy?
"Ross Douthat here, calling the Michigan-UCLA game, a paradigm in which we may perceive the fallen state of man. As Chesterton once said --" [sound of massive wedgie]
I bring up Bryan Curtis and sportswriting because you simply can’t understand Milo Yiannopoulos...
HOOOONK oh sorry there goes the buzzer!  Tune in next week when Charles C.W. Cooke denounces the media for not employing more rightwing fashion writers. 

Friday, April 21, 2023

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/21/23.

For me, a good cover makes you hear the original differently.
I never much liked this song before I heard this version.

I’m outta the hospital and back on my bullshit! As proof, have some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. First one’s about how other Republican officials might try to copy Ron “Three Fingers” DeSantis’ B-movie goon act. (I mentioned this a few days ago but what the hell, it’s news if it’s news to you.) I see Fingers has been having a hard week; apparently some donors (and voters!) notice his charmlessness and lunatic policies could be a liability in the general election. There is one super-rich guy pledging, hilariously, he would “go without food” to make this chunkhead President – increasingly this is becoming the age of the single rightwing billionaire patron, as shown by dedicated contributors to such as Rod Dreher and the Marble Freedom Trust – but it looks as if the closer we get to actual vote-counting time, the less people want a candidate who basically acts out neo-Nazi pamphlets in his governance. Once again, it seems Supercrook will be the GOP’s champion in the brief vote-show before the next insurrection attempt.

Speaking of big donors, the second freebie is mostly a monologue delivered by Clarence Thomas’ charming wife, explaining to the rabble why Supreme Court Justices of a certain political inclination aren’t bound by laws and norms to which we may, in our childishness, have expected them to attend. It has been grimly funny to see such frauds as Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Charles Murray and David French all rushing to defend Thomas’ Sugar Nazi as one hell of a guy who, on that basis, should be able to buy whatever unanswerable public official he wants. But they and the recalcitrant Thomas are part of the same imperturbable ruling class ethic: When the going gets tough, just act as if what the peons think doesn’t matter. It’s worked so far! 

Only other thing I really wanted to mention is Elmo’s blue-check purge. As expected, it’s already making it hard to identify real government agencies and public services from fakes. This doesn’t matter to Elmo and his incel army, who continue to portray the mass decertification as some sort of populist victory. But too little attention is paid to the real purpose behind it. 

Once upon a time Twitter was a good place to find, talk to, and sometimes yell at, people whose expertise and experience, attested to by Twitter, were valuable and meaningful. It was as close to a public forum with such people as most of us ever got.

Now it doesn’t matter whether you actually are, for example, an internationally-known forestry expert, or whether you’re just some guy who paid eight dollars so he can pretend he is one. In fact the phony may have an advantage over the real if he’s a Friend of Elmo – that is, the sort of right-wing troll he favors and amplifies. Where once a user’s achievements were significant, now all that matters is volume – how much one’s signal is boosted by the corrupt owner, and how many bots you can afford to muscle-up your tweets. This destroys Twitter as a resource, but promotes it as a propaganda tool – an alternative universe where the worst ideas are promoted, not because so many people even on the platform believe them, but because shitheels can rig it so it seems like they do. If these people lose again in 2024, count on them to say it’s impossible because Catturd2 has more followers than Biden got votes. 

Friday, May 06, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Four Go-Betweens songs. Never a bad idea.

Only one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free installment this week, the one I mentioned in the previous post about the Dobbs draft decision. Sorry, I need more subscribers and can’t be giving it away all the time. Tell ya what though -- use this link before May 10 and you get 10% off your annual subscription. It’s already absurdly cheap so if you don’t sign up now it’s practically negligence!  

A lot of other brilliant stuff has been written about the recent unpleasantness at the Supreme Court, but as you know my specialty is the crap, and that is in abundance. (I got into it a little in today’s newsletter -- subscribers know.) Basically, the Jesus-cult conservatives who don’t have to worry about alienating any heathens in their audience are ululating ecstatically; the others are just lying their asses off. Some are acting as if the leak of the decision is The Real Outrage, to misdirect attention from the massive injury to human rights the ruling represents (and the possibility that it was a conservative who did it), and to preserve their eternal victim status.  (No matter who else gets hurt and how badly, remember, it's always the conservative who is injured, offended, and cancelcultured.)

And, as previously mentioned, some are pretending that it won’t lead to other reversals the decision’s logic pretty much demands -- the end of rights to gay marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, etc. -- which is absurd enough on its face but when it’s being dished out by such as David French -- author of “Meet the New Public Face of Abortion-on-Demand: Satanists” -- it’s just ridiculous. (French even says Obergefell won’t be overturned “because Alito said so.” Oh, well then!)

But for me the absolute worst is the sort of soft-soap dished out by Peggy Noonan -- not just because, being Peggy Noonan, she is definitionally the worst, but because her passive-aggressive shtick requires she pretend that, whatever we may feel about the decision, it’s for our own good and that her slavering theocon friends will rush to succor us with Christian love:

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

If you have ever actually met a Republican, you know this is laughable. At this very moment, the “Republican men” (and women) of Louisiana are “coming forward as human beings who care about women” by making abortion an act of murder for which women can be prosecuted. There is no concomitant rush anywhere to provide “child-care credits” or “life skills” to the unhappily pregnant. Republicans will do what they always do -- immiserate the powerless -- and their shills will deny it as long as they can, and then turn on a dime and say that’s just what they deserve.  

Friday, May 25, 2012

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Anyone on this tedious rightblogger watch will have noticed the howling frenzy into which Elizabeth Warren's old claims of Cherokee ancestry has driven them. There has been a torrent of gags about "Fauxcahontas," citations of Cher's "Half-Breed," and other leading indicators of the state of Republican minority outreach.

Their main complaint, to the extent that it is coherent, seems to be that Warren must have expected career advancement from her claim. No evidence that she received such perks (appointment to a "Native American Chair" at Harvard, for example) has been discovered, but they keep pitching -- and often tying it to the Obama "born in Kenya" crap they've also been pushing for a few weeks. "I don’t know whether either Obama or Warren intentionally misrepresented their backgrounds," says David French of National Review, "but one thing I do know: The more diverse they seemed, the better it was for their academic careers. " *

I've found the whole thing depressing for a couple of reasons. First, because in the real world playing Indian is not remotely a big deal. Anyone who spends any time in the south or the west will meet many white folks who say they're one-eighth Choctaw, or Sioux on their great-grandfather's side, or such like, usually on no better grounds than Warren's claim that she heard of her Cherokee forebears from her mother. That right-wingers who claim to be conversant with ordinary Americans don't know or pretend not to know this just adds some bitter irony to the situation.

Second, it's just the sort of idiotic thing that, at the nadir of my despair of American politics, I am inclined to expect a major race to be decided upon.

Well, it looks like I was wrong:
A new poll shows the US Senate race in Massachusetts tightening, with challenger Elizabeth Warren running essentially even with incumbent Scott Brown (R), and with relatively few voters undecided...

Back in February, the poll found 49 percent for Brown and 40 percent for Warren. The share of respondents saying they were undecided has fallen from 9 percent in February to 5 percent in the new poll, taken earlier this week.

Warren appears to have solidified her position despite controversy that has emerged in recent weeks over whether she inappropriately identified herself as a "minority" law scholar and whether that self-identification may have advanced her career.
Warren's campaign may still go Pete Tong, in which case I'll probably think up some other reason to be pissed at the voters of Massachusetts. But thank God it won't be over this stupid bullshit.

* UPDATE. I neglected to add that French offers nothing to back up this assertion except tales of his own days at Cornell, which he portrays as overrun by affirmative action hires and admissions and therefore proof that Obama went to the Columbia admissions office dressed in a loincloth and munching on a dog, which is the only reason they admitted him and kept him on despite his suppressed lousy grades.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

I'M A NAZI, BABY, SO WHY DON'T YOU KILL ME.

I see that, since the world is showing its disapproval of Trump's brown-baby-stealing racket and conservatives' initial belligerent and hella dumb responses haven't been turning the tide, the new rightwing comeback is, oooh so you think this is Nazi stuff huh, well then why don't you go all White Rose and get executed to prove it?

No seriously -- look at this guy from the Daily Wire:


I would tell him, #1, there are plenty of Holocaust survivors saying, actually, this is how it started for them, too; and #2, we are doing everything in our power, and in proportionate measure -- for example, the ACLU is fighting the Republicans' attempts to steal the next election. We aren't at the direct-action stage and I hope we never are, but if we do get there, buddy, you better hope nobody remembers who you are.

More low-key but on the same tip is David French at National Review:
If the family-separation policy is so toxic that it leads serious people to tweet images of concentration camps and reduces a television host to tears, shouldn’t you respond to the emergency by tying the president’s hands?
Don't get excited -- he only means figuratively tying them, by... agreeing to the Republican plan, which basically puts the families in jail together (and the President's version puts them in jail together forever). But at least they're not separated -- French actually says "we ought to at least agree that families should stay together, right?" -- so he figures if we won't go for that, we must not think it's so bad then, and we might as well admit it's no big deal

Common sense tells me that the only people who would be fooled by this kind of obvious bullshit are people who want to be fooled. I still make that as less than a majority, and getting lesser all the time.


Tuesday, September 29, 2015

NOSTALGIE DE LA BULLY.

Regular readers will be familiar with the work of David French, National Review's current occupant of the Dreher Chair for God-Bothering. Today he's taking a little break from testifying for The Lord and the Confederacy to tell you how back when he was growing up in Kentuck, his teacher encouraged him to fight his fellow children --
"He said I hit like a girl," I told her. "Is this true?" She asked my friend. Rubbing his face, he nodded. "Well then, you deserved it," she said. 
-- and that's why he's not a sissy like you liberals:
Raising boys to be whiny victims isn’t exactly new. When I first moved to the Northeast in the mid-1990s I noticed that many of the boys raised by the liberal elite weren’t “men” in any sense I could recognize. They were whiny, petulant, hypersensitive, and incapable of either physical self-defense or even the most rudimentary tasks of manual labor. 
It's hilarious in and of itself that the author of "Why Does ‘Organized Religion’ Get a Bad Rap? Because the Elite Lies About It" and other essays about how gays are oppressing Christians is complaining that other people are "whiny." But I find more interesting that French feels he was redeemed as a man by youthful homosexual panic. How many other people still feel this way, I wonder  -- that if a boy isn't constantly terrified of being compared with women, he won't be able to stand up for himself, or do manual labor? Maybe he doesn't believe it at all, but thinks trash-talking liberals' masculinity is an effective way to scare Americans out of their growing support for gay marriage. If only he can convince them that the gay wave will render us incapable of manual labor, and then we'll all be overrun by the Mexicans who've been imported to do it for us!

I think that must be it. He can't possibly take this butch talk seriously -- after all, he's one of the most outspoken supporters of America's most famous single mother.

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

THE HATE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS PREMISES.

You may have seen Katherine Stewart's Times Op-Ed suggesting that the "government schools" theme beloved of modern conservatives has its genesis in slavery and segregation. Some relevant clips:
Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South.
Flashing forward, Stewart touches on the influence of protowingnuts James W. Fifield Jr. and Rousas Rushdoony, and on the Brown v. Board of Education fallout in the South, where "some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private 'segregation academies' for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes."

Stewart also mentions the influence on this movement of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, which insight appears to have twisted some of the brethren's guts -- for the same reason that, you may have seen, Nancy MacLean's recent book on another libertarian saint, James Buchanan, has enraged rightwingers from Reason to The American Spectator to Jonah Goldberg (and, in my view, if you were trying to triangulate the absolute worst of the conservatarian movement you could hardly pick three better coordinates).

Speaking of worst of the worst, Rod Dreher gets after Stewart today:
...I read this op-ed piece from today’s New York Times, in which Katherine Stewart says that people like us — parents who have chosen to withdraw their kids from public schooling, or not to send them there in the first place — are Jesus-crazed racists who hate democracy, or at best useful idiots of said villains. It is liberal crackpottery at its purest.
Then Dreher quotes two of his buddies (Andrew T. Walker and, God help us, David French) on how bad she is -- but he does not quote Stewart. At all. In fact, he doesn't even try to characterize her arguments, except as something he and his pals hate -- and his quotes from them don't mention her historical sources, except for an offhand reference to "tying [church schools] to a Confederate past" from French. Her point of view only appears, distorted, as a reflection in the shiny surface of their rage.

Even for Dreher this is a bit much. But I shouldn't be surprised. As we've seen time and time again, Dreher is pretty much a segregationist, and usually drenches that sentiment in many thousands of words of God-gab and crap sociology to make it hard for non-initiates to see clearly. But what makes him even more defensive and obfuscating in DJing this hatefest than he is in the normal course of his writing, apparently, is when someone catches on to the whole rotten shtick -- that the conservative movement (and the white evangelical movement that feeds it votes) is not just touched by racism, but relies, indeed is founded on it. Then he puts on the whole armor of God.

That's probably what drove him to such an extreme: It's a bit early for him and his comrades to reveal themselves -- after all, Trump's only been in six months; there'll be time enough to talk turkey when this godless democracy thing has been weakened sufficiently to be dispensed with. Meantime anyone who's caught on early has to be swatted like a fly.

UPDATE. I see Megan McArdle has gotten in on this, too ("Demonizing School Choice Won't Help Education," LOL), though she brings her own unique bucket-footed style to it:
One could quibble with some of Stewart’s summation. But it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.
Sure, some people want to get their kids out of public school because they're segregationists, but be fair -- some people want universal health care because they want to gas all the Jews.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

THE LADYKILLERS.

As I've said, and keep saying in my latest newsletter (subscribe! It don't cost much), it seems all conservatives are now solidly on board with Brett Kavanaugh and the Tit and Clit Club and, when it comes to their arguments in defense of the accused attempted rapist, the sober mainstream types are more or less indistinguishable from the crazy he-man woman-haters club types on the fringe. Dig professional harrumph machine David French, for example, arguing in the allegedly legit National Review that the real problem is not Georgetown Prep Republicans who think they own women, but liberal jazzbos who "stripped away moral prohibitions against extramarital sex, celebrated youthful experimentation, combined it with similar celebrations of drug and alcohol use — even at early ages — and then have been shocked — no, stunned — at the sheer amount of groping, grabbing, coercion, and assault." Yeah, elite males getting drink and rapey are the fault of Hugh Hefner; before the 60s, they only raped low-status females who were easily paid off and no one was the wiser.

But give the low-class conservatives credit; while guys like French are matching them in misogyny, they can't keep up with their expertise in plain old insanity.

Take Robert Stacy McCain, who I last noticed attacking Sarah Jeong for racism against whites -- "No one at Harvard or at the New York Times will speak a word in favor of white people, Christians, heterosexuals, or police officers" -- which was pretty ballsy of him, considering McCain is a neo-Confederate.

Well, sure enough, the American Spectator enlisted McCain to tell this mouthy Christine Blasey Ford a thing or two. A large part of his rap, you will not be surprised to hear, involves the Rolling Stone/UVA case -- when Men's Rights types can't get it up for normal porn anymore, they can always get a stiffy over that.

But the meat, as it were, of McCain's argument is that Kavanaugh's accuser has no right to be in a position to make such an accusation -- and the fact that she is in such a position suggests that she's lying:
It is perhaps not a coincidence that Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser is a university professor. The former prep-school girl Christine Blasey went on to obtain two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology, marry an engineer named Russell Ford, and thus become Professor Ford of California’s Palo Alto University. 
That's how women get doctorates and professorates: Marrying titled men!
Having spent her entire adult life working in academia, Professor Ford is eminently qualified as a representative of the mentality that currently prevails on our nation’s university campuses, where male students are presumed guilty of rape as soon as any female student accuses them.
Interesting. And what mentality is represented by Kavanaugh, who has spent his entire adult life as a factotum to Republican Party bosses? Why should his predictable careerist rise be any less suspicious than hers? It would seem the main difference between Kavanaugh's and Ford's position among the "elite," in McCain's view, is that hers is absurd because she lacks a penis.
This mentality was what led to the debacle at the University of Virginia in 2014, when a Rolling Stone reporter destroyed her career...
Let us draw the curtain, or close the men's room door, on McCain, and look in on Dennis Prager at National Review. Prager is a total idiot who has in the past argued that wives owe their husbands sex ("Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood?"). I wouldn't say he's topped that in his pissy column "The Charges against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored," but he comes close. First he pretty much accepts that Kavanaugh tried to rape Ford but shrugs it off because he's been such a good boy since ("No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager"), and that anyone should think otherwise is just "another example of the moral chaos sown by secularism and the Left." But here's the money part, and by "money" I mean nuts:
When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.
If only gals would learn to dodge their bosses' advances like Andy dodged butt-rape in The Shawshank Redemption, then come home and gave their husbands the blowjobs they deserve, we'd have the little gender thing fixed up PDQ.


Tuesday, July 09, 2013

FREE MINDS, FREE MARKETS, BUT AS TO YOUR WOMB...

One of the things I've noticed about the famously libertarian Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds is that, while he claims to be pro-choice,  he seems annoyed that anyone would defend abortion rights and delighted whenever someone tries to restrict them. Among recent examples: "AS I KEEP SAYING, THE GOP NEEDS TO CAMPAIGN TO MAKE AMERICAN ABORTION LAWS 'MORE EUROPEAN'"; a strategy to embarrass male anti-abortion legislators characterized as "#WARONMEN: Female lawmaker seeks to regulate men’s reproductive health"; coy suggestions that Congress tax abortions; durr-hurrs about uncivil pro-abortion signs; and approving citations of attacks on Wendy Davis, including "UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford writes: “Wendy Davis is the new Cindy Sheehan." The guy's some advocate.

Partly, I suppose, this comes out of his whole men's-rights schtick about how women are oppressing men, which he recently took to such lengths ("When people talk about 'reproductive freedom,' they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom") that he ticked off his usual fellow traveller Ann Althouse, leading to a spat and resulting in a rare long Perfesser post full of paranoid gas ("we give women a pass on sexual behavior that would be considered predatory if it were done by males"), whining ("noting the unfairnesses involved, is not 'victimology' — though given how successful women have been in obtaining power via victimology, no one should be surprised if men start to give it a try"),  and just plain bullshit ("When Rush Limbaugh suggested that Sandra Fluke should at least pay for her own birth control..."). Someone who actually thinks this way is bound to consider abortion some kind of illegitimate special right because men can't have one.

Mainly, though, it's a reminder that for libertarians abortion is an agree-to-disagree thing you shouldn't concern yourself over too much, despite the unprecedented current attacks on it, while you should fight to the death for the non-negotiable right of companies to hire workers for five cents an hour if they can get away with it, and to fill the air and water with pollutants pretty much at will. In other words, it's a maximum-liberty movement for adherents who are overwhelmingly male and don't believe they'll ever be in any financial difficulty, and who think empathy is a river on Gor.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit libertarians, here's David French, whom we saw last year raving against gay marriage and, I swear to God, Griswold v. Connecticut ("Think for a moment of the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic. Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?"). Now he's arguing for a "libertarian military." Whereas maximum sexual freedom is an outrage, military-style libertarianism is dead butch -- liberty means more killing and less building, and isn't that was Hayek and Rand were all about?
In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, thoughtful military libertarians tend to advocate something we haven’t really tried in our more than decade-long fight against Islamic jihad — the relatively brief application of truly overwhelming destructive force against identified enemies. 
That’s why I wonder if a libertarian military might be more lethal, even on smaller budgets. A trimmed-down bureaucracy, an increased emphasis on the destructive rather than nation-building capabilities of the force under arms, and doctrines designed to inflict maximum (non-nuclear) destruction on enemy forces rather than transforming and democratizing communities — all of this could add up to a more lethal (yet smaller) military.
Normally you have to tell one of these guys about someone buying a Big Mac with food stamps to get his bloodlust roaring like this. I know there are a lot of guys out there who are like, "oh yeah, libertarians, Drew Carey right, free the weed," and God bless them, but when it comes to the professional-grade stuff libertarianism still just a niche brand of conservatism.

French also makes an avatar for the free-markets-free-fire military of Rand Paul, whose idea of a proper army probably involves grey uniforms.

Friday, August 16, 2019

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Just because it's nice and musicianly
doesn't mean I can't like it.

• I have released into the wild a new issue of Roy Edroso Break It Down so non-subscribers can see it. It is about some great new candidates the Republican Party is offering for Congress in 2020. It is inspried by all the new Republican candidates who are totally nuts, like this guy, and these guys, and this lady and oh why go on, just read my thing it's fun.

• I was seriously wondering why Noah Rothman, mainly known to me as a typical commentary asshole, was trending on Twitter like he was Cardi B or something, and found to my amusement that he is a frequent guest on Morning Joe and that everyone hates him. Further reading suggests his latest offense was complaining about Democrats invoking Michael Brown and Ferguson because it is now part of wingnut catechism that Brown deserved to be killed by that cop and that the Real Outrage is Democrats "lying" that it wasn't a good clean kill. There are plenty of examples, but see David French's "On Ferguson, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris Told a Terrible Lie" for a particularly repulsive specimen, featuring this humdinger: "The publication of a false accusation of a crime like murder is libelous under American law. In other words, their lies may well have been illegal." That's pretty rich coming from a theocon crackpot like French, who is also the author of "Is It Uncivil to Argue That Abortion Kills a Baby?" (Calling a quarter of all American women murderers is cool, apparently, but calling the killing of an unarmed black kid murder is criminal libel.)

When I was younger I used to worry whether I was being fair even to conservatives, and might have entertained their bad-faith, angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussions about shit like this,  but frankly? Them days is gone.